the Ecclesiastical Miracles. 103

There is no presumption against Ecclesiastical
Miracles generally, because inspiration has stood the
brunt of any such antecedent objection, whatever it
be worth, by its own supernatural histories, and in
establishing their certainty in fact, has disproved their
impossibility in the abstract. If miracles are ante-
cedently improbable, it is either from want of a cause
to which they may be referred, or of experience of
similar events in other times and places. What neither
has been before, nor can be attributed to an existing
cause, is not to be expected, or is improbable. But
Ecclesiastical Miracles are occurrences not without a
parallel; for they follow upon Apostolic Miracles, and
they are referable to the Author of the Apostolic as an
All-sufficient Cause. Whatever be the regularity and
stability of nature, interference with it can be, because
it has been; there is One who both has power over
His own work, and who before now has not been un-
willing to exercise it. In this point of view, then,
Ecclesiastical Miracles are more advantageously cir-
cumstanced than those of Scripture.

7. What has happened once, may happen again;
the force of the presumption against Miracles lies in
the opinion entertained of the inviolability of nature,
to which the Creator seems to "have given a law
which shall not be broken/* When once that law is
shown to be but general, not necessary, and (if the
word may be used) when \teprestige is once destroyed,